


A Place of Her Own

by theramblinrose



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Caryl, F/M, based on the broken mirrors universe, because they got her to where she is and they're her parents, but this is mostly about Sophia, caryl is background here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:14:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26804938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theramblinrose/pseuds/theramblinrose
Summary: AU, Oneshot.  Based on the Broken Mirrors universe, can be read alone.  I don’t want to mislabel.  Caryl are background/understood because this comes from a fully Caryl story and they’re Sophia’s parents and got her to this place, but this is actually about Sophia.Sophia finally gets her shop.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Carol Peletier
Kudos: 16





	A Place of Her Own

AN: So, I’ve gotten a few requests for revisiting/adding scenes to Broken Mirrors. I’m accepting those for specific things you’d like to see (even if they conflict, since they are just scenes, it’s not necessarily “the way things go”) and I’ll do them as I can. This is just one.

I’m moving the scenes I want to keep out of a collection to separate stories, and I’m deleting the rest. This is one that I’m keeping.

I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think! 

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The sun was just starting to set enough that the sky looked like it was bleeding. Sophia was late coming back from Union. She hadn’t meant to get held up, but sometimes things just happened that way. She probably could’ve saved herself some time if she hadn’t taken the long way around, forced to drive slower than she might want to because the old truck that was her favorite to drive didn’t handle turns nearly as well as any of the new models, but she needed to take the long way back. She needed to slow to an almost stop, just for a moment, outside of the house. 

There was nobody home. There was seldom anybody home. 

The house looked the same as it always had. It was a little fresher. Whoever had bought it had freshened up the paint. They’d redone the outside. The yard was a little better tended. The porch had been re-stained. But it still looked the same.

Sophia didn’t tell anyone that she drove by there nearly every now and again. She didn’t tell them that, coming home after she graduated, she stopped by there. She didn’t tell them that she’d taken Eli, even when he had no idea what was going on, by there to show him the place where it had all begun—where he’d first come to be something that changed their lives forever. She didn’t tell them that sometimes she liked to simply stop on the curb and look at the house—look up at the window that had been the first she’d ever called hers.

She didn’t tell them that sometimes, like greeting an old friend, she stopped to thank the house for having been a home. Her first. 

She didn’t tell them all of that because she knew that, in many ways, it had been a house of horrors for her mama. She knew that the changes that her mama had made since they’d left that house could have never come to pass inside those walls. And Sophia loved their new home too. She still stayed there, sometimes, when she felt she needed to. She packed an overnight bag, left her own small home, and went there. They never asked why when she showed up on the doorstep. They never asked why when she brought her bag inside. Her parents just welcomed her in as they always did and still told her goodnight before she retired to bed.

She loved her new home, but Sophia never forgot the old one.

She only slowed the truck a moment, on such an important day, to thank the house once again for having been what it was to her. Then she followed the all too familiar route to the shop and turned the truck down the gravel driveway to gun the engine as she sped up the small road to the shop. She might have paved the driveway years ago, but the gravel made a warm and welcoming sound that she just didn’t want to part with. 

Sophia parked the truck, got out, and pulled the bumper from the back that she’d gone to pick up. The part was incredibly hard to find and she’d been ecstatic to get it at the price that she’d paid. She wrestled it out of the truck and carried it toward the building they called the “parts house,” a new addition to the place that was built when the two new stalls were added on, and she fumbled with the door there while balancing it. Inside, she rested it on the sheet she’d already laid out for it and gave it a once over to satisfy herself that she wasn’t dreaming. It really was in almost pristine condition. 

Then she stepped out of the building, locked it with a key, and strolled back toward the heavy side door that led into the main part of the shop. After all these years, the main part—the additions trailing off to the side—had never been changed. If she had her way, it never would be.

The stall doors were closed because the shop was closed. Wren would have left two hours ago. Merle would have slipped out an hour ago with most of the new employees that were on that day. Daryl would have left at least a half an hour ago. There were things to do and there was a party tonight. Everyone needed to get home to take showers. They wouldn’t have waited around for Sophia to drag her slow ass all the way back from Union—even if they didn’t know about her added stop.

Pushing with most of her weight against the heavy side door, Sophia stepped into the main part of the shop. She looked around and noted that the shop hands would have a good deal of cleaning to do when they got there in the morning. Matt and Jacob sometimes left before everyone was done, and when they did that, they came back to disaster. Wren and Merle especially, after all, had never picked up their toys. They couldn’t be expected to do it now.

Sophia might have believed that she was alone in the empty shop, but then she heard the echoing thud of boots on the concrete floor. The sound carried through the quiet of the place. For all the sound that came from there in the day—the din of voices, a radio nobody listened to except for to sing badly to that one song, the sound of motors and paint guns and air hoses working equipment, the noise of metal clanging as it hit the ground or damage was hammered out as best it could be—the place was deathly silent when all that drew to a close. 

When he came out of the office, his head down and his hair pulled back in the tight white pony tail he wore when he’d been working on something, he was looking at something in his hands. He wasn’t looking at Sophia. He spoke to her without ever looking at her.

“This here package come in today. Addressed to both of us. Reckon it goes to you,” he said. 

He looked at her then and smiled. Sophia returned the smile and nodded. She swallowed.

“You open it,” she said. 

He chuckled.

“Can’t,” he said. “Wren already did. Ripped into the damn thing ‘fore the mailman got his ass outta shouting range.” 

He held the small box out toward Sophia and she took it. It was plain and brown and she wasn’t entirely sure what was in it until she lifted the lid off of it. Immediately, the hundreds of small cards, packed tightly in the box, told her what to expect. She smiled at them and took it over to the work bench so that she could wrestle a card out without dropping the rest to the floor. She looked it over, checking the pertinent information of the address and numbers, and then she offered it to Mac.

“Looks good, don’t it?” She said, earning a smile from him. He pinched it between his fingers and studied it.

“Damn good,” he said. “Except—Wendy—you really coulda changed the fuckin’ name of this shit hole. Don’t make no sense to keep callin’ it Mac’s. And you sure as shit didn’t have to put my name on it.”

Sophia took another card out of the box and looked at it. She’d had them printed up to hand out. The old ones had finally run out and they were really dated at any rate. Things needed to be updated to go with the changing face of the shop—they had to change with the times. The cards, now, proudly displayed her name as “Owner,” but underneath her name they had Mac’s name.

“It’ll always be Mac’s,” Sophia said. “Always has been, always will be. You’re the face of this place.” 

She laughed to herself.

“Besides—Wendy’s is an eating place,” she said.

“Right nice one, too,” Mac mused. 

Sophia chuckled.

Mac hummed and excused himself to go and pretend to toy with something on Wren’s tool chest. 

“You’re the face of this place,” Mac commented. “If it weren’t for you? It’d gone under years ago. You know it too. You’re the whole reason we got them new stalls. Got new blood. Got business coming from two counties in either direction—damn lot ain’t never empty.”

He looked at her.

“You did that Sophia,” Mac said, surprising Sophia by using her name. Outside of business calls, it wasn’t a sound she was used to hearing inside the shop. “It weren’t me. I could barely keep the place afloat,” Mac said. “Never made no good decisions about running the place. That what you done. Made all the good decisions.” 

Sophia smiled at him.

“You made some pretty good decisions,” Sophia said. “You took a chance and hired a Wendy-bird for a shop hand. It didn’t turn out so bad.” 

Mac chuckled.

“Best decision I ever made for this place,” he said. “Maybe the best damn decision I ever made period.” 

Sophia didn’t say anything for a moment. She could tell that there was nothing she needed to say. She watched as Mac made his way around the shop. He straightened something here and moved something there. He did a number of things that were really doing nothing at all, and then he turned in her direction, sighed, and leaned with his back against the workbench in a position that he was so accustomed to that Wren joked he’d worn a crevice into the wood that was just about as wide as his bony ass.

Mac dipped his hand into his pocket, jangled some spare change around for a moment, and then came out with a brass key on a keychain with a worn piece of leather on it. He looked at it a moment and then he straightened up and handed it to Sophia.

“Yours now,” he said. 

Sophia took the key from him and looked at the keychain. She’d never seen it before. At least, she’d never seen it close up. It had once been brown leather, no doubt, but it was worn soft and dark from age. She couldn’t make out what it was, but it appeared to have some kind of logo stamped into the soft leather. She nodded at Mac.

“Thanks, Mac,” Sophia said. “For—all of it?” 

He reached and, as his only gesture for the moment, squeezed Sophia’s shoulder near her neck. She resisted the urge to point out that his grip, even for his age, was stronger than he realized. She took the quick bite of discomfort for what it was—affection in the purest form.

“You’re coming in tomorrow, right?” Sophia said. 

Mac chuckled.

“Retired now,” Mac said. “Don’t need my old ass hanging around.” 

Sophia raised her eyebrows at him.

“That’s what the hell all the retired people do—hang around,” Sophia said. “Just that tomorrow? Nobody can bitch about the fact you aren’t doing shit. You can rub it in their faces.” 

Mac chuckled.

“Just like old times, right?” He said with a wink.

“Always,” Sophia responded.

Mac hummed and started toward the door. He stopped by the coat rack and gathered up the gray jacket that he carried in and out every day, even if Sophia had rarely ever seen him put it on. 

“You’re coming to the party, aren’t you?” Sophia asked. 

Mac hummed again and nodded.

“Ya Ma said somethin’ about cake,” Mac said. “And all the damn beer we can drink? Ain’t passing that shit up. Besides—we got a lot to celebrate.” 

Sophia swallowed and smiled at him. 

“Yeah,” she said. “We do.”

“You don’t take too long,” Mac said, making his way to the door and pulling it open. Sophia shook her head in response. 

“Just checking things,” she said. “Turning all the electricity off. I’ll be on in a few minutes.” 

Mac nodded.

“See that you do,” he said. “And—check the door. Fucking lock’s been sticking something awful and Wren’s worthless ass was supposed to oil it, but he ain’t.” 

Sophia laughed to herself. 

“I think I got it,” she said. 

“Yeah...” Mac mused. “I think you do too.” 

“See you in a few?” Sophia responded quickly.

She accepted the grunt as confirmation and watched as Mac stepped out the door and let it fall closed with a loud thud behind him. She stood, in the middle of the shop, rubbing the worn leather between her fingers until she heard the sound of his truck engine start up and she heard the gravel cracking beneath his tires. Then she went and flipped the breakers. In the dark, she fumbled around the familiar space, cursed something she stumbled over, and left the shop to go home and get ready for the party that would celebrate Mac’s retirement and the full change of ownership of the shop.

Her shop. 

It always had been her place, ever since she’d had a single thing to call her own—or a single person to share it with. It always would be her place and she’d fight to keep it going. Because now, it really was hers.

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AN: I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!


End file.
